Every few months someone publishes a “highest paying jobs” list and it’s almost always the same problem: vague salary ranges, self-reported numbers, or data that’s two years old and filed under “2024” anyway. This one is different. Every figure here comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, May 2024 release.

That’s the same source hospitals, HR departments, and the federal government use. It’s not perfect (I’ll get into the limitations), but it’s a lot harder to argue with than a Glassdoor scrape.

The list

What’s actually driving these numbers

The top of this list is almost entirely medicine. That’s not a surprise, but it’s worth thinking about why. Medical training is genuinely long: four years of undergrad, four years of medical school, then three to seven years of residency before you’re seeing patients independently. Surgeons don’t get laid off in recessions. The demand is inelastic in ways that most other professions aren’t, and the supply is constrained by the number of residency slots, which hasn’t kept pace with population growth in decades.

Chief executives at rank 8 are a different story. CEOs earn what boards of directors decide to pay them, which has very little to do with what BLS surveys say the median is. The $206K median understates how skewed that distribution actually is; the 90th percentile for chief executives is well above that, and the people in the 90th percentile are skewing every stat you’ve ever seen about executive pay.

Nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) at rank 9 are the most interesting entry on the list, in my opinion. They’re the only non-physician role that can administer anesthesia independently in most states, which gives them negotiating power that’s genuinely unusual for a non-MD. $203K is real money that a lot of physicians don’t make, and it requires a fraction of the training.

The location thing people ignore

Software developers sitting at $132K nationally sounds like a lot. And it is. But that national median is almost useless for decision-making because the range is enormous.

A software developer in Mississippi earns around $85K median. One in California earns around $165K. Same job title, same BLS code. Geography is doing most of the work in that $80K gap, not skill level or company size (though those matter too). If you’re a developer thinking about where to live, or you’re negotiating an offer, the state-level data is what you actually want. The national number is just a starting point.

This applies to basically everything on the list. Registered nurses at the bottom earn $86K nationally, which includes California’s $125K median and Mississippi’s $63K median in the same average. Those two states describe completely different jobs in terms of purchasing power and lifestyle, and lumping them together in a national figure hides that almost entirely.

What this list doesn’t tell you

BLS data is a snapshot. May 2024 reflects employer surveys from late 2023 and early 2024. If you’re in a field that shifted a lot since then (AI-adjacent roles, for instance), treat these numbers as a baseline and check recent job postings to see where the market actually is right now.

The other thing worth saying: median doesn’t tell you where you’d land. A newly licensed pharmacist at a retail chain and a senior clinical pharmacist at a hospital system both show up in the $132K median. The 10th percentile for pharmacists is around $91K, the 90th is around $162K. Knowing which end of that range applies to you matters more than knowing the median.

State-by-state breakdowns

If you want to see what any of these occupations actually pays where you live:

• Registered Nurse salary by state
• Software Developer salary by state
• Physician Assistant salary by state
• Financial Analyst salary by state
• Marketing Manager salary by state
• Nurse Practitioner salary by state
• Pharmacist salary by state

Or pick your state from the homepage and see what every occupation pays there.